RIMBAMON©: A Forest Monitoring System Using Wireless Sensor Networks

Forests are important to the lives of every human and animal living on this
planet. It provides an environment for many species of plants and animals, thus
protecting and sustaining the diversity of nature. However, it is constantly being
threatened by illegal logging and indiscriminate development. This problem needs to
be overcome in order to protect our forests before it is too late. Therefore, there is an
urgent need to constantly monitor the conditions inside the forest especially under the
forest canopy in order to develop a comprehensive, real-time Forest Decision Support
System. This report presents the RIMBAMON© system which is aimed at providing a
way to capture and manipulate forestry environmental data coming from the sensors
in a sensor network. This system utilizes Wireless Sensor Networks for
communication. As there are several existing technologies that employ the Wireless
Sensor Networks technology, this project will focus on the TinyOS operating system
for sensor networks. Various tools will be used to develop the system; such as the
TinyOS Simulator (TOSSIM), Java, Cygwin and TinyViz. The concepts behind
wireless sensor networks and the tools used in this project are examined and
discussed alongside simulation and testing of TinyOS. The outcome of this project is
a prototype system which is able to monitor and report the conditions under the forest
canopy.